Scott Sublett
Film critic Alonso Duralde’s “Hollywood Pride: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Representation and Perseverance in Film” covers the waterfront of queer cinema, starting with “Dickson Experimental Sound Film,” W.K.L. Dickson’s 1894 experiment in synchronous sound that has two male Edison employees dancing together as Dickson saws the violin. Duralde then carries the reader through all the way to “Moonlight”, the first openly gay love story to win a Best Picture Academy Award, and then beyond that to an explosion of independent queer cinema lasting virtually up to this minute. It’s one of those rare works that speaks to both experts and fans.
And worry not, there’s plenty of dish. Even if you consider yourself completely in-the-know as to Who Was, Who Wasn’t, and Who Did What to Whom, there are shockers. Everyone knows about Cary Grant and Randolph Scott. And Ismail Merchant and James Ivory? Well, all those E.M. Forster novels. But Tyrone Power and Cesar “The Joker” Romero? Monty Clift and Jack Larson, the actor who played Jimmy Olson on “The Adventures of Superman”? How about Spring Byington, the character actress who from the 1930s onward held the franchise on endearing WASP mothers, for instance in “You Can’t Take It with You” and the 1933 “Little Women”, starring lesbian Katherine Hepburn and directed by gay George Cukor. Miss Byington, it turns out, cohabited with Marjorie Main, who played the slatternly Ma Kettle in the hugely popular Ma and Pa Kettle films of the late 1940s through the mid ‘50s (a series that saved Universal from bankruptcy). “It’s true,” said Main, “she didn’t have much use for men.”
Queer artists are film history: Murnau, Eisenstein, Valentino, Nazimova, Ramon Navarro, George Cukor, Marlene Dietrich, Garbo, Vincente Minnelli, John Schlesinger, Cole Porter, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Tennessee Williams, Rock Hudson, Pedro Almodóvar, James Dean, Noël Coward, Fassbinder, Pasolini, Derek Jarman, Tony Richardson, and Lindsay Anderson, to name a few of the hundreds in Duralde’s book.
But legends aren’t the whole story—the books also celebrates “below the line” artists such as hair stylist Sydney Guilaroff, who invented Louise Brooks’s bob, Lucy’s red dye job, Claudette Colbert’s bangs, and Dorothy’s pigtails in “The Wizard of Oz.” One comes away from “Hollywood Pride” understanding that the cinema as we know it does not exist without the contributions of queer artists, but ironically, as queers were creating the art of cinema they were simultaneously excluded from representation in it.
The book skews Hollywood, but includes many international entries such as Jaques Demy, Rosa von Praunheim and Céline Sciamma. Experimentalists, too, get their due, with Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Warhol, John Waters, the Kuchar Twins, and Bruce LaBruce. And of course, Chantel Akerman, whose minimalistic “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (1975) was named the greatest film of all time in the most recent “Sight & Sound” Critics’ Poll, displacing Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” which itself had deposed “Citizen Kane” after Orson Welles’s masterpiece reigned for 50 years. With the democratization of the means of production, latter chapters of the book are loaded with examples of queer indies made possible by cheap new technology and the consequent lower budgets, such as “Tangerine,” the award-winning 2015 indie about a trans woman on Christmas Eve, shot entirely on iPhone.
Ahead of its time in dealing with conversion therapy
Duralde also touches on how queer cinema existed in the context of world history, for example Paragraph 175, the German law criminalizing male homosexuality, made even more draconian by the Nazis in 1935 (now even tendencies were illegal), and not fully rescinded until 1994. It meant that the men Hitler sent to Buchenwald and Dachau in pink triangles were, when the camps were liberated, sent to German prisons to serve out their “sentences.” Meanwhile, in the United States, homosexuality was considered merely a moral failing until military psychiatrists starting screening men for service in World War II, and thereafter it was categorized a mental illness; in 1952 homosexuals became officially sick when it was included in the American Psychiatric Association’s first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It was not removed until 1973, which means that queer baby boomers grew up told that they were mentally ill, while watching sad, self-destructive, pathologized homosexuals in Hollywood movies.
But then there was “Victim,” the 1961 British drama in which matinee idol Dirk Bogarde (closeted, but everyone knew his roommate Anthony Forwood wasn’t his “manager”) courageously played a married barrister facing blackmail. “Victim” was the first English language film to use the word “homosexual,” and its effect on public opinion contributed to the decriminalization of homosexuality in England in 1967.
All in all, Duralde’s richly comprehensive book is a considerable work of scholarship and could creditably serve as a textbook for a University course on queer cinema—or just a birthday gift for a movie buff. So many films, actors, and filmmakers that even the most learned scholar will find something new, and so bounteously illustrated that one could relish it just for the pictures. The subtitle says it all—a “celebration,” and while it doesn’t ignore the bigotry and tragedies of queer film history, it’s heartening that 44 years after Vito Russo’s justifiably enraged ur-text of queer film history “The Celluloid Closet”, there is now so much to celebrate.
Hollywood Pride: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Representation and Perseverance in Film” Running Press, 321 pages.
